ThatAnimeSnob

This is the debut work of the now late Satoshi Kon, and straight away he proved how talented he is in making quality anime. Combined with the huge budgets by such as Madhouse, the king of anime studios, the result was more than great. It is a great psychological thriller and shows well how fame makes you marry a role from which you cannot get a divorce without challenging you mental health.

What I liked about Satoshi’s style is how he is constantly criticizing the society his characters live in. Instead of going for the easy way out and offering fan catering and escapism (aka what almost every anime does these days) he instead went the other way and went preachy about the modern way of Japan. And he wasn’t too “in your face” while doing that, so it was a great overall.

In this movie for example he delves into the dark side of the pop idol industry, which all other anime are presenting to be all fun and games. Ok, perhaps some exceptions include Looking for the Full Moon and Key the Metal Idol but all anime in general present them in the same way Hollywood tries to deify its actors and singers. Yet it is easy to see how most of them are behind the scenes up to the knee in drugs, sex scandals, and death threats, thus you get this movie trying to get into those issues.

The protagonist is quite the good girl but because of the pressure of her line of work she leaves her very popular music band to become a solo actress. This is seen very negatively by her fans who do the usual stupid things all fans do. Things get even messier when her new colleagues in the movie industry are killed one after another, while someone pretends to be updating her online blog. Thus it appears that a lunatic stalker turned to a killer and is out to destroy her for betraying her love to him.

There are some really disturbing truths and facts in the film, such as showing how an angelic figure of a teen idol is eventually led to do pornography if she needs to keep her line of work and not be kicked out in the streets. There is also the mentality of the audience who expect to see her being sexualized as well as the fanatic followers who refuse to allow their favourite idols to mature or adjust to the passing of time.

What makes it so great though is how everything is so blurred and confusing. You have no idea half the time if something is reality, a dream, or perhaps a hallucination. Is the rape scene real, an act, or real that her mind made her believe it was an act? Was she really waking up from her bed or was it all a nightmare? And what the hell what that bizarre chase in the end where she is hunted by a shape shifter? All that can of course be excused as mind tricks caused by her stress or even flashy cinematics for the sake of making a blunt story to look more interesting. It still looks gorgeous, has amazing production values for its time, professional directing, and leaves food for the mind without directly bombarding you with morality speeches.

Now, I have heard lots of people who didn’t like the movie at all, saying it was slow, the stalker was a magician, the ending was rushed, or that its themes are commonplace in all psychological thrillers. Although all that stand true up to a point, the truth is not many films have managed to combine said elements in order to create this surreal result. Some can say live action movies such as Citizen Kane or Black Swan did a much better job but when it comes to the anime medium it just stands out from the lot. There aren’t many titles that manage to be really creepy and unsettling as Perfect Blue, and this alone is what makes it a worthy addition to anyone’s collection.